At the start of 2016, we touched on how bacteria was quickly becoming resistant to key medications that doctors often used to defeat it. This is a major concern, because in some cases, bacteria is immune to most major medicines. When all have failed, doctors often have few places left to turn. One drug, as we disused, called colistin was legitimately considered the last line of defense against illness. Some scary findings showed that the use of similar drugs in livestock were beginning to cause some bacteria to develop immunity against them. It had begun a rally cry to change regulations to keep such things from happening. Today, those cries seem to have been heard.
A voluntary ban that aims to safeguard essential antibiotics for humans by limiting their use in food animals should now be fully in effect. Under the Food and Drug Administration policy, antibiotics that have been designated “medically important” — in other words, they’re needed to treat people — cannot legally be given to healthy animals to speed their growth.
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